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Capcom is facing a lawsuit from a former employee who claims harassment by her superiors drove her to attempt suicide.

A former employee of Japanese game developer and publisher Capcom has filed a lawsuit against the company, claiming that harassment directed at her by her superiors while working on the upcoming game Dragon's Dogma led her to attempt to commit suicide.

You can read the whole story over at Kotaku. I think it's important to note that this is essentially an unconfirmed, obviously one-sided story at this point. Simply because someone files a lawsuit does not mean that anything like this actually happened.

That being said, it wouldn't surprise me if the young woman was picked on by her superiors. Poor management can ruin a good company, and there's plenty of politics - including fierce resistance to change and staunch preservation of the status quo - that help bad managers stay at the top of the pile, or couched cozily somewhere high enough in the middle.

I've met enough people in leadership positions who see power as something to inflict on others rather than as a privilege that requires as much humility as anything else.

A good leader builds up their subordinates and fosters openness and loyalty; bad leaders wield their authority like a cudgel, forgetting that their leadership extends only so far as the effectiveness of their team.

There's a fine line, of course. The boss who tries too hard to be her employees' friend can be just as ineffectual as the tyrant. Meanwhile, some tyrants end up making great leaders. Plenty of people have described the late CEO of Apple, Steve Jobs, as something of a tyrant. But he was visionary enough to lead his company to greater and greater heights.

There's a difference between playing hardball and harassing your workforce, of course. Inspiration takes many shapes. Sometimes hard-headed, visionary yet dictatorial executives are just as inspirational as nice guys.

Petty, vindictive leadership, on the other hand, almost never helps an organization. It may help the managers who inflict it upon others, but it can kill the human potential necessary for organizations to adapt and evolve. A petty corporate culture stifles new ideas and innovations by discouraging young employees from growing.

In the case of the Capcom employee, we know next to nothing, and Capcom has declined to comment on the issue, telling Kotaku that company policy prohibits commenting on ongoing litigation. I think it's best to withhold judgment until we have a clearer picture of what happened, including corroborating evidence of harassment.

It's also tricky to write about events like this that happen in Japan, where the corporate culture is vastly different from that of the United States. In the big, elite Japanese firms many employees are molded to the job after college and work at one company for their entire career. The job-hopping so common in the United States makes leaving a company much easier here than it would be for a young woman at a big Japanese firm like Capcom.